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I’ve been meditating relatively regularly for over six years now. Whilst I grappled with the relentlessness of my mind initially, I found ways and mantras (of my own) to help. Aside from the added perspective this has helped me to develop, a lot of the learning led me to be much more adept at just noticing my thoughts and the variable shape of my mind.

These thoughts are sometimes positive, sometimes negative, usually inquisitive, invariably testing; for everyone, me included.

Having built this ability to notice, combined with some notable “hacks” I use to enable interruption of these thoughts, means I can make choices about what I think about.

This concept first came to me when I first heard about metacognition on my mindfulness journey years ago. Humans are alone (I think) in being able to think about what we, and others, think about.

A case in point is the existence of this post. I was adrift, as I walked through a local park on my way to town. I was on a time travelling journey into the future and I noticed the fictions my mind was conjuring. I interrupted the fantasy and asked myself: “What do I actually want to think about?”.

This ability to notice the thoughts my mind creates makes it easier for me to ameliorate my concerns as they arise; those that we all have to deal with occasionally. It helps me decide what to think about, and to limit fruitless daydreaming, or in this instance, time travelling: reprocessing past events or conjuring the future. It’s a brilliant prompt to pull me back to now.

Meditation has also helped me to better detect my highly muffled emotions, to feel them launch and to be more intentional about letting them fly, or grounding them.

Much like the previous challenge, the question “Do I want to feel like this?” is useful, whatever the answer. I can’t remember where I first heard this intervention, but it’s a game changer for me.

Meditation has also taught me to recognise the amount of autopilot that exists in my communication with others, and surprisingly, in theirs with me. Soundbites, conversational shorthand phrases, bullshit and inattention. Noticing and interrupting these can help drive better conversations.

Does meditation give me a Zen like inner peace? No, for me that is impossible, even more so since I cheated death, bar fleeting moments of cathartic calm. But meditation does give me the ability to wield control over the one thing in my life I can control: my mind.

This gives me a sense of productivity, purposefulness, and focus. Rather than being buffeted by the dramas arising around me, and in the unenlightened minds of some people I interact with.

Do I still fear and worry? Of course, but only so far, laying down a marker for attention and opportunity. Not rumination.

Rumination is ruination. An utter waste of time.

Despite the fear, I knew I could do this again, but the cold was extreme. The first few steps were easier than I expected, perhaps because years of running had numbed my feet. As I walked further out, the cold sharpened surface of the water shaved my legs, the chill finding its way into my calves, my thighs, a relentless icy assault. Moments later the pain gave way to a deep relief, like a red hot blade being thrust into oil, quenched.

The overfamiliar cold took a violent grip on my groin, holding my wide eyed attention for a few seconds. As I stepped further forward, the razor of the water’s surface continued up and over my hips, past my navel, coming to rest around my waist.

I stopped a moment, as the water’s surface, huffed and puffed into a low chop by the wind, sawed at my midriff. I felt my heart change gears, feeling a lag, like a slipping drive belt, a tired pause, then it pumped up to a faster pace. My legs had disappeared. I could only feel the soles of my now dead feet, hostage to the rocky lake bed, and being compressed flat, like old leather soles.

I checked my heart rate. It was at a brisk walking rate of 90, whilst standing still. Without thinking about it, I leant forward and pushed myself off, feeling the molten ice of the water overwhelm my shoulders, as it tried to pull me under. My arms remembered how to swim, whilst my alarmed mind checked my body was still alive. The cold bit hard, down to the bone in my fingers, into my CPR ravaged ribs around my sternum, easing them with a tight squeeze, like an impossibly deep massage.

My heart got to work. My back felt like it was made of glass, about to shatter under the pressure of the cold water that filled its valley, and laid waste to the warmth it found there, clawing it away.

My heart rallied, my breaths eased in sympathy, and I realised I was swimming free, the water so dense at 3.7 degrees that it felt like treacle. My splashes sounded like blades of ice, lurking mere degrees away, waiting to slice and fillet my warm body, and deliver a sashimi delicacy to the fish.

I had waited four months to swim for mere minutes, to remind myself of the closeness of death; close but not quite yet. I swam until my hands froze solid, beyond pain, and my skin started to feel warm. I swam until I felt I could swim all day, fully aware of the water’s cruel deception, a revenge for daring to step in and disturb its winter peace. It was time to get out, whilst I still could. To swim yet another day.

To have experienced it clinically is not permanent death, but it is as close as any of us can get and be able to talk about it. Death has touched us.

Interestingly, in the cohort of people I know who have also escaped its grip, death would appear to hold few mysteries. A black nothingness. Like a section of blank videotape in the timelines of our lives.

There is a gravitational allure to the “rest” of death. The phrase “rest in peace” highlights the human perception that you’ll get to experience the rest, and the peace, as some form of reward for a hard life or death.

My experience is that you experience neither of those things. You experience nothing. You are just as you were before you were born. Absolutely nothing.

But is there potential in that yawning nothingness, an infinite absence of anything more? Does it need something to occupy it? Or is that instinct just a figment of our minds grappling with the indifference of the universe? Indifferent as it was before we winked into existence and as it will be when our minds eventually die.

For me, death is not a rest, or peaceful. It is not holy glory, or damnation. It is just nothing, absolutely and irrevocably nothing.